ShepherdPics, Shepherdpics ~ The Blog

Book Review: Finding the Picture: A Location Photography Masterclass

I have recently finished reading Finding the Picture: A Location Photography Masterclass by Phil Malpas and Clive Minnitt.

I found it a really enjoyable read. There are loads of excellent images within its pages and each photograph is accompanied by a commentary from both Phil and Clive.

The commentaries work really well with both photographers happily critiquing there work and offering suggestions as to how they could have improved the picture. The comments are well thought out and offer a real insite into the thought processes behind each shot.

I read the book a few pages at a time and then used my camera as soon as possible afterwards. Having the comments and image critiques fresh in my mind really helped to focus my mind on the whole business of picture taking.

Highly Recommended.

Labels: Books, Taking Pictures

Inside Lightroom 2 - A Book Review

I've just finished reading Inside Lightroom 2: The serious photographer's guide to Lightroom efficiency: The Serious Photographer's Guide to Lightroom Efficiency by Richard Eamey

Its an interesting book that attempts to go further than the simple "how-to" books.

Chapter 1 starts with details of what Lightroom is, and a basic an overview of its functionality and features. It doesn't add too much to your life, but it sets the context for the rest of the book.

Next he goes onto "the ideal system" for Lightroom 2 well, it covers most of what you need to know but it is a relatively shallow description of what you should be looking at. A serious photographer would be better off looking at the The DAM Book as it covers this in much more depth.

Then we get a description of the differences between version 1 of Lightroom and version 2. Although this well written and added to my knowledge on the subject it had the feel of being a bit of padding.

Chapter 4 takes you through how to manage your photos and there is quite a bit of useful information here. This is followed by an example workflow, which is a great way to see how the product is actually used. Though it would be great to see a few more workflows detailed here for different types of photographers: journalists & wedding photographers leap to mind.

After that it is on presets. Clearly this is an area that Richard knows a lot about and explains in great detail. It really shows how presets work, and it even shows you how to edit them in a text editor, which is rather wizzy. This allows you to duplicate some of the tone curve functionality from Adobe Camera Raw. All clever stuff and well worth reading once you really understand Lightroom.

The final chapter details online resources for Lightroom, which is surprisingly useful due to the use of tinyurls and a grouped rss feed that makes it easy to get to grips with what is out there.

At the end of the book, I was left with a feeling that it is excellent in parts and somewhat disappointing in others. Personally I would like to see the workflow and presets sections used as part of a different book "Extending Lightroom 2". This would cover those two subjects as well as, the use of the various plug-ins available, real world issues like how to integrate web galleries into your existing site and a guide to writing your own plug-ins. Now that would be well worth buying.

Pros
Clear layout
Detailed knowledge of Presets
An easy quick read

Cons
Too much padding
More examples needed

Labels: Books, Lightroom

Light in the Landscape - A Photographers Year

I have been reading one of my Christmas Presents: Light in the Landscape - A Photographers Year by Peter Watson and very good it is too.

I must warn those of a nervous disposition that the book is a few years old now and all the shots were taken on film. The past, as they say, is a different country...they do things differently there. But amazingly the constant use of words like "Velvia" do not detract from the book.

What I liked about it, was that it talks about the ups and downs of getting the shot in a way that I completely recognise. Not just the usual comments you find in Landscape togs books about pre-visualising the scene and waiting a week for the light to be right.

Light in the Landscape

In this book Peter admits making mistakes, not being completely happy with compositions and even racing up and down the side of a loch then clambering over a load of brambles in an attempt to catch the light at the end of the day. Some times he lucks out & gets 2 good shots within 20 minutes of each other, other times he gets a shot but is not completely happy with it. This is more like the landscape photography I recognise.

The book works through a year of photographs week by week. Each photo is accompanied by a description and some technical information about it. I feel I will keep this on my bookshelf to give me something to look at when I am wondering what to photograph.

Labels: Books, Gifts

The moment it Clicks

I have just finished reading Joe McNally's book The Moment It Clicks.

And a very enjoyable read it has been too. It bills it's self as "one foot on the coffee table & one foot in the classroom", so does it manage to please both audiences?

I think I would say that it does a pretty good job of doing both, the images are of stunning quality. Each presented with a story and then some text on how the image was created for me the most moving image was of Phan Thá»< Kim PhÃºc (The Napalm Girl) holding her baby:

Phan Thá»< Kim PhÃºc
by Joe McNally

For each scene he offers some words of advice about how he took them - mainly how they were lit. The use of strobes and diffusers (like a white sheet nailed over a door) have really fired my imagination. Perhaps the odd- diagram of how the shot was set-up would help but that is a bit nit-picky.

The advice in the book has made me resolve to learn about (and use a lot more) flash next year and try some people shots. This may be come essential as having pretty much said I would never shoot a friends wedding - I have volunteered to just that!

Highly Recommended.

Labels: Books, Gifts, Photographers, Taking Pictures

The Romantic Norfolk Coast

Good friend, and fellow Painter with Light John Duckett, has just released his first book "The Romantic Norfolk Coast". Its full of his stunning images from the and well worth a look.

Labels: Books, News, Photographers

Rocks - A Thing of Beauty

I have just become really privileged to get my hands on a copy of Bill Atkinson's book of abstract rock images "Within the Stone". The book is a real thing of beauty with amazing images jumping off every page.

Petrified Wood
(by Bill Atkinson)

The other feature of the book is the remarkable print quality, the purity and vividness of the colours take the breath away. Bill is a colour management guru and he apparently spent a lot of time working with the printers to develop new techniques that represented the colours in the original images perfectly and boy does it work!

To be honest I'm not sure that someone like me who regularly breaks the spines of books and folds over page corners to keep his place should be entrusted with such a precious thing but I will be on my best behaviour with it.

Recommended for all fans of Abstract photography, fine art photography and great printing.

If you are in the US you can get a signed copy from Bills Site unfortunately he doesn't ship abroad but in the UK you can get it from Amazon: Within the Stone: Nature's Abstract Rock Art.

Labels: Abstract Photography, Books, Photographers

More fun in the LAB - colour enhancement.

In an earlier blog I mentioned that one of my Christmas presents was Photoshop Lab Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace which, as it goes, is a very long title for a book.

Well I have finally finished it and I have to say it is really rather good. The easy writing style helps, the tutorials clear and there is a CD of images so that you can try it all out yourself on the images in the book.

The LAB colour space is designed to work in a similar way to the human eye and as such allows us to do things that are almost impossible in other colour spaces. When we view a scene we often perceive it as much more colourful than the film/sensor records it.

Anyway whilst on ephotozine the other day I uploaded a modification to this picture of Filey beach by Neil Davis.

I enhanced the colours with a simple LAB move that I learnt from the book, I promised to explain what I did to Neil, so here's how to do it.

The image has a very slight blue cast so we need to fix this before we enhance the colours otherwise we will end up with a bluer cast.

I Selected Image>Adjustments>Colour Balance and moved the yellow/blues slider towards Yellow a little (about -5) and repeated this with Shadows, midtones & highlights selected down the bottom.

Now its time for the lab magic.

Select Image>Mode Lab Colour. The Image>Adjustments>Curves.

First alt-click on the background of the graph thingy till it shows a series of fine grids like this:

We will ignore the lightness channel - you'll have to get the book to see what that's for, and select A from the channel drop down at the top of the screen.

Now slide the bottom point across to the first grid-line (the input box should read 10). Then slide the top point across to the first grid-line (the input box should read 90). You should get a curve that looks like this:

Now select channel B at the top and do the same with that. Click OK.

For a further colour boost you can use steeper curves so that they run from 20 to 80 instead of the 10 to 90 in the example. or even 30/90 as I have done here:

In the next blog posting I shall show a comparison of the different colour boost methods for you to compare.

Labels: Books, Photoshop

Stuck in the LAB again.

One of my Christmas presents was Photoshop Lab Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace which, as it goes, has to be one of the longest book titles I have come across in a long time.

It's a long and detailed book that takes some reading, I found it was best to work through about two pages then work out what disk that comes with it was talking about with photoshop and the example disk that comes with it.

But once you get used to the LAB colour space and using the curves to modify it, then it does start to make a lot of sense. The book is cleanly written with lots of examples and the accompanying CD provides just the sort of example images you need to understand the concepts involved.

When would I use LAB? Well I'm only halfway through the book but the advantages seem to be that the LAB colour space separates contrast from colour information. Tweaking the curves (ohh listen to me, I didn't understand curves at all till I read the book!) allows you to boost contrast in areas that would normally be impossible in other ways.

The other use seems to be to provide a real differentiation on groups of similar colours, which would be very difficult to do in any other way, even with the raw processor.

A recommended read for those of you who really want to get into the guts of photoshop. Here is a quick "before and after", I've been playing with (click on the images to view large..it's quite subtle and only really works big):

Original after Raw conversion.

A minor LAB tweak later and Tower Bridge emerges from the gloom and the HMS Belfast has got its colour back. The changes were applied to the entire image yet the man's orange jacket and sign are unchanged.

Labels: Books, Photoshop

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Wednesday, 17 February 2010

Book Review: Finding the Picture: A Location Photography Masterclass